Hi, i’m new to Roon and would like to shuffle my library, but only one song for each artist.
Is there a way to create a focus that achieves this?
Thanks for your help!
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Gave this some thought, but I’m stumped. Not sure it can be done.
Let me get this straight. You only want one song from each artist ever? So if you have ten albums, you only want to play ten songs?
Thanks for your replies!
I’m coming from JRiver Mediacenter, where i have implemented such a query on my library and use it every day.
The reason is, my library consists of about 1,000 artists with a very different amount of songs for each.
Bob Dylan has nearly 200 songs, whereas A.A. Bondy has only one.
That means, i would hear Bob Dylan too often and other artists too seldom. I don’t like that.
If i filter my library so that every artist delivers only one song per query and afterwards shuffle the result, i get a non-boring sequence of music (like a radio).
Additionally i only query on titles that weren’t played for at least a month.
To answer your question “You only want one song from each artist ever? So if you have ten albums, you only want to play ten songs?”:
Yes, correct. That’s the reason, i want to focus on only one song per artist. I hope that’s possible in Roon, too.
It’s funny how we all have our own way of enjoying music. In my case, I don’t use playlist or random music. I like to play entire albums at a time. When the album finishes, I’ll let Roon radio play a couple of selections to see if it brings up another album I should add.
So do i for classical music 
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Okay, makes sense. I don’t think you can do that in Roon. You can focus on specific artists, but there’s no way to filter that to just one song. You can focus on songs that haven’t been played during a time period, but you can’t then limit it to just one of those songs. I shuffle most of my library so it plays like a radio. Using focus I can limit it to the genres I prefer then I focus on songs that haven’t been played. However, my library is more than 34,000 songs so I never get the same artist back to back.
If you set Roon Radio to be limited to your library, I believe we have some rules in there that prevent any single artist from playing too often.
Over a long listening session I don’t know if you’ll get exactly one song per artist, but it shouldn’t repeat Bob Dylan over and over just because he has 10x as many songs as other artists in your library.
On the queue screen:
Hope that helps!
Thanks, i will try to limit Roon Radio to Library.
I have tried the option to limit Roon Radio to Library, but without great success.
Artists are not really hindered to play too often.
In one case Leonard Cohen was played twice in a row with different songs.
So, this doesn’t work for me.
But i have found out, that external playlists are recognized, if they are in a known format (m3u) and in a known folder (a subfolder of my library folder).
So i can easily generate those playlists with JRiver Mediacenter and enjoy them with Roon. A win-win situation for me.